Amazon Stores give brands the ability to maintain their brand identity on the world’s largest online marketplace.

All of those benefits alone are enough reason to invest in Amazon Stores. But on an even bigger scale, most brands are excited about Stores because this means they no longer have to worry about losing their brand identity in a competitive online marketplace.

Key features of Amazon Stores

Amazon Stores Offer Multi Pages

Multi-page Amazon Stores (up to 3 levels deep) can be used to exclusively showcase your brand and products. Customize the experience based on what your brand needs.

There’s a Self Service Amazon Stores Builder

The intuitive and simple to use store builder empowers you to create engaging Amazon Stores. Easy-to-use templates are available that simplify the page building experience.

Brands Can Use Rich Media and Content to Stand Out

Support for rich media and content, such as text and images, helps elevate the shopping experience.

Below is an example of an Amazon Store built out for a luxury beauty brand, R+Co:

“These stores are a significant improvement over the older brand pages, and they should allow Vendors to get more creative with the design,” Ryan Burgess, Marketplace Channel Analyst at CPC Strategy.

“Another super cool feature of Amazon Stores is that you can build highly customizable pages showcasing a single or small group of products, perfect for new launches.”

“You can include videos, a slideshow of photos, text, all sorts of content to really push new products.”

Amazon Stores: How Do They Look?

Amazon Stores are comprised of one or more pages. Each page is comprised of a header and footer surrounding a number of content tiles.

As see in the example below, each Amazon Store can have 3 levels with multiple pages at each level:

Pro-Tip: When driving traffic to these new storefront pages via Headline Search Ads, you can send shoppers to the home tab or directly to another category (example: shampoos & conditioners). Each page has a unique URL, so you can enter this specific URL when you create the campaign.

Amazon Stores also allows you to choose from 3 templates (default tiles):

Marquee

Highlight

Product Grid

The Amazon Store Manager has four sections including:

Page Manager: Used to create, select, move and delete pages from the Amazon Store

Preview Window: Provides a live view of the current page and can be used to select a tile to edit the Tile Manager.

Tile Manager: Used to add, edit, move, and delete tiles from the Amazon Store.

Status Bar: which provides the current moderation status of the Amazon Store and displays any error messages.

Amazon Stores: Submission & Review Process

According to Amazon, once you have finished building your Amazon Store, you can submit it by clicking the “Submit for publishing” button. Your Amazon Store will be submitted for moderation. Keep in mind, you can’t make changes to your draft while it is being moderated.

The moderation process can take several days.

Before you publish your Amazon Store, you should check for the following:

Spelling or punctuation errors.

All changes are included in the draft version.

Use the mobile preview to make sure that your Amazon Store is optimized for mobile experience.

Check your images and videos to make sure that any text in them can be easily viewed (including on mobile).

How to Use Amazon Store Insights to Measure Success

Up until recently, it’s been difficult to measure the impact of creative – specifically for Amazon Stores.

Now, brands have access to daily and aggregate views of their store’s performance through a new program – Amazon Store Insights.

“The new Amazon Store Insights feature gives us insight around the effectiveness of the Store and allows us to understand how an audience interacts with the pages that we create,” AJ Swamy, Client Services Manager at CPC Strategy said.

“The Store insights also allow us to tag external traffic so we can finally get more information around the effectiveness of external advertising campaigns that we route to our Stores.

“With Amazon Store Insights, we can see how many customers convert organically from the store, which is groundbreaking.”

Tagged sources: Traffic being tracked with a custom source tag. You can create source tags for different traffic channels to get granular traffic tracking by source. Tagged sources data is only broken down to individual tags when it meets Amazon’s data count threshold within your selected time range. You can learn more about Tagged Sources here.

Other: All other traffic sources not categorized.

Frequently Asked Questions About Amazon Store Insights

Amazon Store Insights is fairly new (not to mention a bit confusing, especially at first). Luckily, Amazon has answered a variety of common questions and concerns about the new platform:

Q1. Why is some data in the analytics dashboard unavailable?

According to Amazon, as they “add information on your store performance over time, there could be instances where data is not available.”

Here’s why:

Units and sales data are only available as of December 25, 2017.

Tagged sources data is broken down to individual tags when they meet Amazon’s data threshold. Amazon only provides a breakdown of the top 30 tags.

Q2. How are sales and units sold calculated?

Amazon calculates the total sales or units sold based on Marketplace data. They take into account sales generated by store visitors within 14 days of their last visit to your store.

As of today, there are 2 types of attributed sales Amazon uses:

Direct sales or units: Total sales or units purchased of products available on a store page, where the store page was viewed by the purchasing customer.

Halo sales or units: Total sales or units purchased of products available on Amazon from your brand, where the product purchased was not available on the store page viewed by your customer.

Q3. How are sales and units sold attributed?

Amazon uses a last discovery methodology to attribute sales and units sold to pages and to sources.

Sources: Amazon attributes the sale to the last source of the customer visit, prior to their purchase.

Pages: Amazon attributes all direct sales to the page viewed that contained the purchased product. They attribute halo sales to the last page viewed in the customer visit prior to their purchase.

Pro-tip: It’s important to note that Amazon display sales data in Stores insights based on the date of the visit, not the date of the sale itself.

Q4. If I use Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores, will I see my Stores performance data in Campaign Management?

Any data that is a specific store metric, such as views and daily visitors to your store, will only be available in Stores insights.

Q5. I am using Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores. My campaign reporting shows different performance for my ads than what is reported in Stores insights. Why?

Stores insights shows the impact a traffic source has on your store page views and attributes sales based on those views. Amazon ad campaign reporting shows you the impact of the campaign itself on the audience that was exposed to it, whether or not the audience reached your store.

Both sets of reporting provide different insight on how your campaign is performing, and as a result the reported performance may not match between them.

For example, within a single Amazon Headline Search ad a customer can click on a product image and go to its detail page, or click on your brand logo and go to your Store.

The campaign reporting will give you a view of the performance of the ad, regardless of where the customer clicked. Stores insights will show you the performance of the campaign looking only at customers who reached your store.

Amazon Stores: The Bottom Line

If you haven’t thought about investing in Amazon Stores, it’s time. But if you haven’t even started with Amazon A+ or EBC Content, take care of that first.

Now that there are ways to measure the results of Amazon Stores, it’s not just about brand equity or fluffy brand awareness metrics.

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About the AuthorTara graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a B.S. in Journalism / Business. Her passion for creative publishing and quality reporting landed her work opportunities at several companies in Massachusetts, New York and California. She is a leading voice behind CPC Strategy’s Blog. See all posts by this author here.

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